I've been having problems with insufficient space in our tiny apartment recently. Burda Style mags are specifically troublesome, as their number keeps increasing, while reducing the free space, so the mags are spread all around the apartment, making a true chaos. When we moved in three years ago I took with me only a minor portion of my sewing magazines collection, and left the majority at my parent's. These magazines are never used and I am annoyed by it as I know there are numerous fantastic patterns that just aren't reachable to me.

So I've been thinking for a while about how to fix this problem and finally came to a conclusion that having the patterns in a digital format would be a space saver. That of course meant I had to scan my collection of around 150 issues of sewing magazines. Having them scanned in a copyshop would too expensive, so I invested in a scanner / printer determined to do the hard-work myself.

As it appears, the scanner is a handy place for Djole to take a nap.

So I started with an endless scanning of the magazines, page by page. I scan the photos of the models, and the workbooks, omitting the articles written in German (we import German issues of Burda and translate to Serbian only the workbooks), and the ads. I keep the pattern sheets in paper format and stack them into big folders. Along with each pattern sheet I put a cover page of the corresponding magazine, which makes it much easier to browse through the patterns.

One big folder can stack pattern sheets from 24 magazines, meaning that I can zip two years worth magazines into space that's six times smaller. I think that is a significant space saver.

Each magazine is saved to a PDF file, and I make an additional file that stores the technical drawings of all the models from all the magazines, sorted by months and years. This makes browsing through the patterns much easier for me, and the pattern sheets are finally well sorted and easy to reach.

I've completed approximately 1/3 of the job, as I scanned around 60 issues. I've been very busy! I can't explain how anxious I am to sort the whole collection of the magazines. While I've been scanning the pages, I noticed so many gorgeous patterns that I want to make as soon as possible. Some of those I haven't noticed before, but some are the ones I have been wanting to sew from the moment I saw them.

Even though scanning reduced the space the mags were taking, I still had to find a place to store the folders with pattern sheers. When you live in an apartment as tiny as ours is (it has only 30 square meters ~ 323 square feet), each piece of furniture has to be multipractical. So I decided to use a tiny corner where my ironing board was. Instead of having an ironing board with foldable legs, I decided to make it an ironing shelf, where the board would be placed on top of a book shelf which would store all my sewing literature. The shelf had to be custom made. By ourselves (D. and myself).

D. designed it and I assisted while constructing, so this weekend we made the ironing shelf. We put it on big wheels so that the shelf can be easily moved around if needed. Considering this is our first time doing carpentry, the shelf isn't perfect, but I am very pleased with how it turned out. I am already thinking of other pieces of furniture I would like to make for my sewing nook.

To illustrate the ratio between the space the magazines take compared to the folders: one box in the shelf can store 24 magazines, the same number of mags (or the pattern sheets) fits into a single folder.

So, how do you store your sewing magazines? Do you have a special system that makes handling the patterns easier for you? How big is your collection of sewing magazines?